From Database Complexity to Developer Joy: How RecruitNow Streamlined Their European Expansion with RavenDB

Jorn Theunissen is a lead developer at RecruitNow, a Netherlands-based software company, that develops and sells Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and other recruitment-related software, and is considered the market leader in its home country (and a major contender in the E.U market). In 2023 the company was acquired by the Zvoove Group, a leading provider of digital solutions for the staffing industry – a move that is aimed to further expand RecruitNow’s foothold in Europe.

RecruitNow’s core product, “RecruitNow Cockpit”, has been in production for more than five years, and services customers across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (and of course The Netherlands). RecruitNow Cockpit is a recruitment platform designed to manage the entire hiring process, necessitating the storage and processing of vast amounts of data related to candidates, job postings, client information, and workflows. Initially, RecruitNow utilized a traditional relational database system, specifically SQL, hosting their database in-house. 

When he worked with SQL, Jorn felt he was spending more time building complex database queries than actually shipping features.

Before joining RecruitNow, Jorn’s work involved managing numerous rows across many different tables and meticulously ensuring complex relations between them — a common practice with SQL databases. At companies that used such databases in their product, a primary pain point was the necessity of dealing with complex join relations across numerous tables, a process that consumed a considerable amount of development time. Querying large lists of data efficiently was also challenging, requiring complex lookup schemes and memorizing various index keys. Back then, when he worked with SQL, Jorn felt he was spending more time building complex database queries than actually shipping features. His employer felt a similar agony, as development time and effort held back business expansion.

Beyond development hurdles, the in-house hosting of their database led to operational hassles that they sought to avoid. When support issues arose, especially those needing quick resolutions for production environments, the company usually had to rely on consultants specialized in relational databases. These consultants were costly, and finding solutions often took weeks, significantly delaying problem-solving and impacting their ability to quickly address critical issues and provide fast answers for support tickets.

RecruitNow, however, turned out to be a different and much more positive experience for Jorn. When the team started working on “Cockpit” (before Jorn had joined them), they needed to find a better way to streamline data management, development processes, and operational efficiency — considering RecruitNow’s growth plans and the need for trusted infrastructure to support them.

From Complex Joins to Simple JSON

RecruitNow tested, vetted and transitioned to RavenDB, a NoSQL document store database. This was Jorn’s first experience with a non-relational database, and he was ready for a traditional and lengthy onboarding and learning journey as he began using RavenDB. However, he notes, the adoption process was remarkably straightforward, with Jorn and the team becoming fully accustomed to and utilizing it in less than a week without needing initial training. 

RavenDB’s document-based structure, which organizes all necessary data for an object in a single place using a readable JSON format, turned out to be intuitive and logical. This structure directly eliminated the need for complex joins across multiple tables, addressing a major development pain point and saving significant time. RecruitNow initially hosted RavenDB in-house but later migrated to RavenDB Cloud to avoid operational hassles and benefit from managed services. 

“Honestly, I cannot recommend it enough. If you’ve touched RavenDB, you don’t want to go back to anything else.”

Jorn, Lead Developer at RecruitNow

Furthermore, RecruitNow Cockpit operates in a multi-tenant environment, utilizing RavenDB to assign each client or business unit its own dedicated RavenDB instance, ensuring data isolation and performance while supporting scalability. The RavenDB Studio UI also proved to be a critical component, enabling incredibly fast data lookups by simply entering a single ID into a search bar. RavenDB’s support team provided invaluable assistance, Jorn says, responding within a day with detailed plans and charts to improve even complex or automatically produced queries, a level of support Jorn had not previously experienced.

RecruitNow Saw Dramatic Performance and Usability Gains

Implementing RavenDB when work on Cockpit started led to significant improvements for RecruitNow. The transition from SQL’s multi-table joins to RavenDB’s single-document structure saved a substantial amount of development time. The ease of use was exceptional; developing features, querying, and saving data became much simpler. “It doesn’t get any easier than that”, says Jorn, who not-so-secretly admits that he’s “quite in love with it”.  

Data retrieval and query performance saw dramatic improvements; the RavenDB Studio UI provides data “real fast” with “no load time” and “no complex joining”, Jorn emphasizes, allowing for rapid access to data, which was invaluable for quickly addressing support issues. The migration to RavenDB Cloud successfully avoided operational hassles and provided the benefits of managed services. 

As their platform scaled and served more European markets, RecruitNow expanded their RavenDB usage from 1 to 13 instances, effectively managing their growth. The multi-tenant architecture, with dedicated RavenDB instances per client, ensured isolation of data and performance while facilitating scalability. “Honestly, I cannot recommend it enough”, Jorn summarizes. “If you’ve touched RavenDB, you don’t want to go back to anything else”.

Are you facing similar challenges with complex database operations, slow data retrieval, or operational overhead? Discover how RavenDB can transform your organization’s development workflow and data management – and accelerate your business results. Explore RavenDB’s features, read more success stories, or try our product to experience the benefits first-hand, and see why we claim being boring is actually a good thing.